Opinions, enthusiasms, staircase wit.

August 24, 2015

now even puppies have become something awful

Those of you that care about this already know about it. Isn't that
always the case? But it is yet another example of one of the
scary ways that the world is changing around us as we rise
each morning, go to work, care for our loved ones and generally
persist.

It's about science fiction! (It's okay, I'll see most of you
guys back here later.) To sum up, the same portion of humanity
that got all upset about non-bro viewpoints in video games and harassed a bunch of
women into hiding (y'know, the dingbats who pop up in threads
with "Actually it's about ethics in video game journalism)
decided that the Hugo Awards, the primary awards ceremony for
the sci-fi writers out there, were being controlled in some
sense by non-bros. So, led by a couple of decidedly-bro authors
of the white-dudes-with-big-guns-variety, they decided to
rig the balloting process for this year's Hugos. And they were
successful! All categories were bro-heavy, and some categories
were bro-exclusive. (For some reason the bros became known
as the Puppy movement, divided, of course, into two factions:
Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies. This is only important because
it is ridiculous.)

So many thousands of words were written and there was
actual concern in the air: would this brazen subversion of the
process actually result in junk sci-fi winning awards?

Well, and here is what you should walk away with, the Hugos
were last weekend, and the Puppies got
beat like a drum:

The evening began with an appearance by a fan
cosplaying as the Grim Reaper, and it turned out
he was there for the Puppies. Not a single Puppy-endorsed
candidate took home a rocket. In the five categories that
had only Puppy-provided nominees on the ballot--Best Novella,
Best Short Story, Best Related Work, and Best Editor for
Short and for Long Form--voters instead preferred "No Award."
(Here's the full list.)

But as you run off to read the (really good) Wired piece,
you can't not have at least have a taste of the specific
complaints of the Puppies factions. This is a
strangely triumphal piece
by one of the fellow travelers of the Puppies movement about
how the Hugo Awards was in fact a victory for the Puppies.
The author sums up:

Emboldened by the success of GamerGate in resisting cultural
meddlers and authoritarians in video gaming, sci-fi fans
resistant to identitarian politics are fighting back. Every
year their numbers are growing, and they are more disciplined,
more relentless and more determined than their social justice
foes.

The real moral of this story is that the Puppies lost, in the
same way that the GamerGaters lost, in the same way that this
very vocal minority always will because for the time being
actually good people outnumber them. There's no success to
be emboldened with. There's just a sad little circle jerk of
dramatically aggrieved men who could use therapy a lot more
than this self-reinforcing crusade against whatever windmills
took all their privilege away.

I only share this bit of verbiage because it's fascinating how these splinter
cells of culture warriors quickly develop this argot that is
dripping with seriousness and intent but really just a bunch of
whiny rot. Fascinating like mildly diverting. Fascinating like
just in case you were tempted to empathize.

But the Hugos were saved! And the next time these mistakes
of history want to try to culture-jam some other damn thing,
they'll lose that too.